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We've been milling wheat with wind power for more than a thousand years; run-of-river hydro-mechanical solutions have been used for milling, mining, and forging

• rootusrootus 7mo ago
  I imagine it would not have been so dramatic, though. Might have ultimately found our way to the same spot, but a few hundred years longer. It is hard to argue that the incredible energy density of fossil fuels (oil in particular) is not a big driver of our industrialization.
  • dleslie 7mo ago
    There's certainly a quality to it that has lent itself to the suburbanization of the USA. In the absence of viable electric battery technology, the suburbanization would have relied on street cars and pedestrians. Which existed. And were ripped up around the time the automobile took over; which has all sorts of theories around it as to why... I think without oil we'd have higher density cities, better public transit, and healthier populations.
• triceratops 7mo ago
  > And of course, there's steam. How do you make steam without burning something? If you say nuclear fission then you're proposing that humans would somehow have invented electric mining vehicles and mined enough ore to invent fusion without burning a single hydrocarbon molecule? I suppose in an alternate reality where we simply had no fossil fuels this may have been the tech tree. It would have taken centuries longer though.
  • dleslie 7mo ago
    Coal was certainly a problem; we have the word "smog" for a reason. But we were already on our way to electrified transport, via street cars and similar, when the automobile surged to popularity.
    • LegionMammal978 7mo ago
      And where does all that electricity come from? Until the 40s or so, hydroelectric plants and wind turbines could provide hardly any power output compared to coal plants, later supplemented by gas plants; even the electric streetcars relied on fossil fuels further down the line. Renewable energy development would've had to scale an order of magnitude further than in reality to be a basis for industry and transportation, alongside advances in electricity distribution and storage to pull it from where it's generated.
      • dleslie 7mo ago
        The solution, in the absence of oil, would be to simply build more hydro and wind. Neither are particularly difficult technologies. Where they would have lagged in efficiency they make up for in simplicity. Distributing electricity isn't easy, but it also isn't particularly insurmountable. We had to solve it even with oil as a source of electrical generation.
        • LegionMammal978 7mo ago
          Your scenario seems baselessly optimistic. If it were just as simple to run society off of those, we would've been doing it to some extent already: it's not like Big Coal or Big Oil was blocking everyone else from having ideas about how to generate power (see: the initial spread of gas power, followed by the spread of nuclear power), and surely many people would've had the incentive to produce power without dealing with coal miners or oilmen. It's that it would've been dramatically more expensive without all the design iterations they have since gone through. And if you greatly restrict supply at a given price point, without changing the underlying demand, you'll end up with much higher prices and lower total volume, so we wouldn't enjoyed all the compounding benefits from access to energy.
• simonh 7mo ago
  It wasn't necessary for it to happen eventually, but if eventually is several generations further down the line because it would have been painfully slow that's an important factor to consider. Slower industrial and economic development would include huge human costs in terms of slower medical, social, economic and possibly also political development. It might have some beneficial effects as well though. I don't think it's an easy calculation to make.
  • dleslie 7mo ago
    We had rapid social progress _despite_ suburbanization. It never came to pass that we could assume that every household had a car, there was always a statistically significant urban populations that preferred transit, and delivery of public services is less efficient with lower density populations. I happen to believe that we would be a healthier, happier society if suburbanization had never occurred. If we walked more, and had better access to the services we need, then we'd be healthier and happier. And it would be cheaper to deliver services.
    • simonh 7mo ago
      I think that may be insufficiently factoring in energy costs. If energy costs a n order of magnitude or two more for an extended period, you just get a whole lot less economy generally, and therefore a whole lot less of everything an economy can provide. Walking more sounds great, but I'm not sure it compensates for what could be an order of magnitude less health care generally.
      • dleslie 7mo ago
        Health care is more efficiently delivered to higher density populations. Low density populations increase the time to access health care, which increases the risk of delivering emergency care but it also encumbers access to primary care with the associated access time. Suburban areas are a great deal more expensive in terms of health care delivery. Consider that in the absence of suburbanization there is decreased demand for energy. Higher density housing is cheaper to service overall, but also provides greater efficiency in accessing services. The reduced efficiency of suburban residences _requires_ the existence of high density forms of readily accessible and consumable energy; it simply isn't viable to build an American suburb without cheap energy, because it is a hideously inefficient model. But other models _do_ exist, and _are_ successful. The suburb can die and society will be better off for it.